Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846: With Instructions for Collecting, Preparing, and Forwarding Objects of Natural History Written by The Professors Administrators of The Museum Of Natural History At Paris. And Instructions Relative to Anthropology and Zoology
History
Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846: With Instructions for Collecting, Preparing, and Forwarding Objects of Natural History Written by The Professors Administrators of The Museum Of Natural History At Paris. And Instructions Relative to Anthropology and Zoology
Exchange of publications
4º To determine exactly and analyse the liquids contained in the
breasts of the dam, and the digestive organs of the mammary foetus.
5º To examine in the living subjects the remarkable arrangement of the
respiratory organs, discovered by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, which
establish a connexion between the posterior nostrils and the cavity of
the larynx.
We are entirely without notions concerning the abdominal folds, which,
in this kind, take the place of the pouch, in a certain degree, and
know nothing of the modifications these folds pass through in the
different epochs of gestation.
_Anthropology_.--The countries to which these instructions are
adressed to are doubtless among those where naturalists can collect
the greatest number of interesting facts for this branch of natural
history, formerly neglected and to which has been given, for some
years past, an impulse worthy of its high importance. In Mexico and in
the United States three of the principal human races are found
together; the race peculiar to America, the Caucasian race from
different countries of Europe, and the Ethiopian carried over in its
train. All these races cross-breed, and from the crossing of the
half-breeds with them and each other, result many curious
combinations, whose scientific study is of the highest interest.
It has unhappily been, for a longtime, as difficult as it is
important. If the plain and marked characteristics of the two animal
species often disappear; if a skilful analysis, enlightened by direct
comparison with analogous objects, can alone discover them, how can
the anthropologist size between two neighbouring types, express and
transmit by description, light, fleeting distinctions, some times
invisible for him, who has not the habit of observing them?
Three inventions or new application, made almost simultaneously, have
happily removed part of the great difficulties, and opened a new era
in the natural history of man; the daguerreotype, which fixes and
engraves with geometrical precision, the general shape of the body and
the features of the face; the Cephalometer of Antelme M. D. which
measures and sketches with a process almost as exact, the dimensions
and forms of the head, and enables one to determine, as nearly as
possible, the mean dimensions and typical form of the head of a people
the sex and age: in fine, the perfection and happy application to
anthropology of the process of moulding, performed directly, or by the
aid of the ingenious physonotype of M. Sauvage; a process by which the
whole head and, if necessary, the members of the body are preserved
and placed before our eys.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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